An image stream may be assembled from a series of still images and displayed to a user. The images may be created or collected from various sources. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,604,531 to Iddan et al., assigned to the common assignee of the present application and incorporated herein by reference, teaches an in-vivo imager system which in one embodiment includes a swallowable capsule. The imager system captures images of a lumen such as the gastrointestinal (GI) tract and transmits them to an external recording device while the capsule passes through the lumen. Large numbers of images may be collected for viewing and, for example, combined in sequence. An image stream of, for example, 40 minutes in length, containing for example about 4,800 frames, may be presented to the user for review. Other numbers of frames or lengths may be used.
In one embodiment, a streaming rate is preset, but the user can increase or decrease the streaming rate at anytime during the review process, and/or define a different streaming rate. In general, a user may try to set the streaming rate to the highest rate where the user can quickly and effectively review the image stream without missing important information that may be present in any of the images included in the stream. The rate at which a user can effectively review a image stream is limited by a physiological averaging effect that is known to exist at around 15 frames per second (although this number varies for different users and image streams) above which certain details in individual images displayed in the stream may be physiologically filtered out.
Therefore, a need exists for a system and method that enables a user to increase the rate at which the user can efficiently and effectively review an image stream.